Reward learning with badges

Kids under the age of thirteen (13) are not allowed to create accounts on social media. Therefore, I had to look for something over and above platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. So I looked at different physical alternatives – I looked at using lanyards to show off skills, I tried wristbands, and finally I tried using one-inch buttons. Besides, a button machine does not really cost a fortune, so why not?

These buttons can be placed on backpacks. Kids hang their backpacks on the hooks and their friends and teachers can easily see the badges. So, if I am a teacher and if I am looking for a skill, I will notice the backpacks and think, “Oh, I am looking for video creation skills. This kid has earned a video badge. Why don’t I ask him to make a video about Tom Sawyer?”

So, for a successful badges program, you need something tangible. You also need a place for the badges to be displayed on. But are badges a really good idea? Well, it may not be a good idea if you are heading in the wrong direction. How? Let me give you an example. When I was a kid, my teacher used to place a chart with names of all the kids in the classroom. It had little gold stars on it for different activities done in the classroom. Contrary to my friends, I was really bad at reading out loud. They had all those stars shining next to their names while I had none. The Bottom line – I do not appreciate a concept, which I hated as a child. It is a bad idea to start a badges program to evaluate the content. I will discuss this further in the next chapter.

So what exactly is a digital badge?

A digital badge is an online image that tells people about a new skill that a kid has learned. Digital badges are cool since they have metadata, i.e. information built into a digital object. Digital badges have a lot of such information packed inside. If someone clicks on a badge, they will see:

who gave out the badge (the issuer)

who earned the badge (the collector)

when the collector earned the badge

activities the collector had to undergo to earn the badge (the criteria)

photos or videos of the project completed by the collector to earn the badge (the evidence)

We will talk about these points later in the book. In the next chapter, I will emphasize further on linking badges with skills rather than the content.

Why do I love badges?

Besides my affinity to the scouts and badges, I love the badges program because the kids want it so bad that they do most of their work for badges at home. Let that sink in for a second, my students work on their badges at home without being assigned. In my most recent informal survey of my students, I found that over 70% of the work on badges was being done at home.

My students realize that they need each other – they need to interact! Badges require teamwork as they cannot make a movie alone, animate alone, etc. No one is doing the same thing at the same time. They are all doing different things.

In my experience, badges ensure 100% engagement; there is absolutely no messing around! And if they are stuck, they can always find a classmate who has that particular badge.

It is interesting that I see girls being engaged in traditional ‘non-girl’ situations like engineering. Badges, for me, bust through all gender limitations and walls created by our society.

Here is Austin from my early days of podcasting, you can read a bit about him below.

If you were to ask 1000 teachers what they thought the purpose of education is, you would undoubtedly get a lot of different answers. The reality is that there is not one singular purpose to education. Instead, there are many, and the purpose I want to focus on with my technology projects is to give students opportunities to find their passions in order to become productive members of society.

If you really think about it, isn’t this what all teachers want?If I am a math teacher, don’t I want to inspire my students in such a way that there will be a few students that find out that math is the subject they are truly passionate about? Students that had no idea that they could be a math whiz, but now with my help they have found a spark that will hopefully last a lifetime. This is how great teachers make great scientists, writers, poets, etc.We want to give our students tastes of different subjects and materials and hope that they find the one that “fits” them. A concept that Ken Robinson compares to dormant seeds in Death Valley that are, “simply waiting for the conditions of growth.” The Element (Penguin Group 2009). Conditions that we as teachers have control of. We need to awaken our students with a big watering can of potential.

After a few years of running my new and challenging tech curriculum and tech-clubs I had a student named Austin who signed up to be in my newly formed morning news podcasting club, and as standard procedure I asked why he wanted to be part of the morning news team on the application. His answer was that he wanted to get over his “shyness problem.”

As things developed with the morning news podcast, this shy 5th grade student ended up expanding my mind as to what I thought young students were capable of- just like Dr. Tyson promised me they would. In fact, he inspired me to write this book.

Austin had been trained on how to use our little elementary school’s news podcasting studio and was really getting the hang of being a newscaster. His shyness seemed to be disappearing with every chance he got to be behind the mic.

Then one Wednesday it happened. It was a cold December morning in 2009 and Austin had turned up at his usual time to do the morning news. His 4th grade sound tech had cued up all the sound effects, checked the mics and was now ready for the show to start at precisely 8:05 AM. Meanwhile, Austin had prepared the normal script, complete with the lunch recess weather forecast, the hot lunch menu, birthdays, etc.At 8:05 AM the sound tech counted down, 5... 4... and then silently turned up the mics as her finger signaled for him to start.What came out of this 5th graders mouth was amazing. He was off script and totally ad-libbing his show- sure, he was still covering the news, birthdays, etc., but he was doing it his way. As I watched his sound tech scramble to keep up, a smile grew across my face as I realized he got it; he had found something that he was really good at, and he knew it.The show ended, he hung up his headphones and walked out of the studio to be the new shining star of our elementary school. All I could do was smile as he walked off to his first-period class.

Austin was a seed who found the right conditions to grow and flourish.It was then when I found out that the most rewarding part of teaching is when you see a child find a passion for something that they never knew they had. This is what great tech projects can do for our students. That is why I designed my tech badges program for my elementary school.

I'm better now, but as they say; I had to hit the bottom, before I could see my way out.

I still vividly remember the day a few years ago when I came home and announced to my wife that, “I quit!”

I was an elementary technology teacher, and I was done with teaching.

Maybe it was because my wife was a middle school principal at the time and had dealt with teacher meltdowns before, or maybe it was because my wife was my wife and knew my limitations -- anyway she just looked up and said, “Okay.”

It wasn't just one particular thing that set me off; it was the culmination of many things that caused me to become disenchanted with teaching. I remember thinking to myself in many different teaching situations that this, “wasn't what I signed up for.” I was turning into another cynical teacher — one who realizes that perhaps the mountain to education reform was just too big and too steep to conquer.

My wife gave me some time to cool-down before discussing my options. She started by asking me to explain what was so wrong with my job. I thought about her question for a moment and then explained that I had thought that technology would make my classroom so much better – students should be well-behaved and lessons should be amazing because after all, I was using technology.

I was a tech teacher for crying out loud — this should be my dream job!

After many different conversations on the matter over the period of a couple of weeks, I decided not to quit my job. I decided instead to change my job.

The problem, as I soon figured out, was not the technology itself, but it was instead what we did with the technology that matters. Teachers who take their infamous worksheets that they have had since the 90's and just make a Google form out of them aren't exactly embracing the capabilities of technology. The status-quo does not get better with technology -- in fact, I would argue it gets worse. So the hard reality is that teaching does not get better with technology per-se; we as teachers must use the technology as a tool to make things better.

My second problem was that I thought technology would make better students, but it doesn't. Students who are not challenged will turn in so-so tech assignments. Students who are not challenged will be bored and cause trouble. Don't believe me? Tell your students you will now be reviewing how to make bullet points in Word — step-by-step for 60 long minutes. Watch how quickly your class falls apart. I came to realize that to our students technology can be really boring because we are not challenging them with it.

So I started to search the web for educators who were doing great things with students and technology.

I clearly remember the first time I saw an unbelievable technology project made by young students. I was searching the Internet for information about podcasting, and eventually I came across a website that had a middle school principal who had done a few podcasts. His name was Dr. Tim Tyson and at the time he was the principal of the Mabry Middle School in Marietta, GA.

My research into podcasting continued as I was lead to his school’s website (he still keeps it archived at www.MabryOnline.org). I was amazed to see how much this principal was podcasting, but that was not the unbelievable part. What happened next changed me as a teacher for the rest of my life.

While on the Mabry website, I saw a link to their 2007 film festival. I clicked the link and soon I was watching the film-work his middle school students had done. I was blown-away to say the least. I had never seen this type of quality work from college students, let alone middle schoolers.

Within days I was on the phone to Dr. Tyson asking him all sorts of questions. Starting with the biggest one I had, “Who really made those movies?” He told me in a matter-of-fact tone that his students had. I told him I didn’t believe him. He laughed and explained to me that he gets that a lot. He assured me that they had a high expectation when it came to the tech projects that the students make at his middle school. At Mabry they do not allow their students to do sloppy film work. Instead, they needed to follow a quality checklist with areas like sound, lighting, etc. He went on to explain that most teachers allow students to do poor work when it comes to tech projects because they don’t know what to look for; after all they are (insert subject area here) teachers, not filmmakers. He went on to explain that you don’t need to go to film school to know what makes a good video. He stressed that a student should not be allowed to turn in a video that looks like it was shot during an earthquake or has such poor lighting or sound that you cannot see or hear what is going on. And he did this back in 2007!

It was like he flipped a switch inside of me. I had no idea that young students were capable of such great work. Here I was an elementary tech teacher and now I knew what I wanted my students to do. I wanted them to make such incredible technology projects that people would be calling me someday asking who really made them. I wanted people to say, “There is no way a third grader took that great photo.” Or ask, “How many grownups helped make that movie about the civil war?” What I wanted were unbelievable tech projects for my elementary students. I wanted to push my students to do great work with technology, not just mediocre work. I wanted them to do projects that they could put in their digital portfolios and say with pride years later, “Yeah. I made this movie when I was in elementary school, pretty cool, huh?”

This is what I wanted, but where was I to begin?

Like many teachers, I had never studied filmmaking, graphic design or web programming. However, allowing students to do a poor tech project was like letting them write stories and allowing them to do anything they want – any way they want.

Poor grammar – sure.

Spelling errors – yup.

Bad punctuation – you bet.

Or, it is like allowing students to solve math problems any way they want – no order of operations, no learning your times tables, etc. We as teachers would never allow this to happen in our other projects even if the students worked hard at it. We would correct them and teach them the proper way. Yet, when it comes to projects that use technology, we allow bad presentations, videos, podcasts, web pages, etc. to be made by our students. All because as teachers, we have no idea what to look for and how to grade these projects.

The biggest problem is that when it comes to technology, the tables are turned, and we consider the students to be the experts and we, as the teacher, are the learners. We are intimidated by our students, after all, they know live in this world and we are only tourists. But the reality is that technology actually makes our role as teacher more important than ever and not obsolete. We, as their teachers need to step up and show our students how to use technology better. So what I needed now was a way to get students to be experts with technology, even if I myself was not an expert.

To get better technology projects, we need to demand better technology projects. No different than what we expect from their projects in reading, writing, math, science, geography, etc. We must demand the very best technology projects from our students. The employment-world they will soon be entering into will expect nothing less than this. ​

Students with technology are just seconds away from finding facts on anything, any time they want.

In a world where facts are now free, what do we do with students?

For example, the other day I was on a tour of a “high-tech” middle school and I walked into a classroom to see students filling out an online quiz on the rivers of South America. Since the students weren’t allowed to use their technology to find the answers, they had to regurgitate their answers from memory.

So here was a classroom full of students with iPads staring up into space hoping that they could recall from memory some basic geography facts.

Why on earth did these students need to memorize the names of the major rivers of South America?

Facts are free, they could find these answers in seconds using Google.

The teacher was proud that his students were using technology in his classroom, but is this really the best we can do?

For students to not just survive, but thrive in this new world, they need more than facts. Anyone can get facts. They need to be thinkers and creators.

But as teachers, most of us teach facts. So what are we to do?

It comes down to skills. We, as teachers, need to shift from teaching facts to teaching skills. This is why I changed my whole approach to teaching technology and came up with a badge program that not only motivated my students to learn new skills, but it also forced them to think and to create projects using just their iPads.

I remember after the first iPad project I heard a student talking to his partner saying that he had no idea that his iPad could make animations - I knew I was on to something big.

This is why badges are so important; we have students that think that technology is only for entertainment and teachers that think technology is only good for looking up facts. My badges allowed both groups to move beyond these basic rudimentary objectives and do so much more. I don’t want to sound sensational, but the badges allowed students to literally change their world for the better.

One of my students performing in an iPad 80's band as part of a fundraiser for a library program in Nicaragua.

“How can we use technology to make our world better?”

When I first started to consider an essential question for my tech badges program, I must have tried seven different ones before settling on the one above. The first one I tried was “How can I use technology to make my world better?” but I did not like how sounded so selfish — with a single student in mind. I knew from the onset of this system that I wanted students to work together and collaborate. So I soon changed the “I” to “We” and the “My” to “Our” so that students knew from the beginning that they cannot do it alone.

When my system was being peer reviewed, I had one colleague suggest that I remove the word better. He said that it suggested that our world was broken — I ignored his suggestion — because the world is broken. If fact, the world is so broken that I started this whole system based on two facts that were so obvious that I could not ignore them anymore.

Here are those two facts as I see them…

Fact A - I realized that we could not wait for this techno-generation to grow-up before they make a difference. They had to be taught at a young age how to improve their world. We need changes to start now, not 10 or 20 years from now.

Fact B - This generation is stuck in a technology rut. Most of them have settled on just using their technology for just gameplay and entertainment. They need to learn that technology is a tool that they have the ability to change the world with.

At one time, I was going to drop the word technology from the essential question, but I felt that, as a technology teacher, I should keep it. I guess if I was a math teacher, I would change the word technology to math. But that would be a different book entirely since I have no idea how to use math to make our world better. This also means that you as the reader, know that this book is about how students use technology to improve their world.